AI Consultant · Columbus, OH
An AI consultant in Columbus who builds what he recommends
Columbus runs on a few big engines: insurance and finance around Nationwide's headquarters, a logistics network that moves goods across the Midwest, retail chains with headquarters in the city, and a health and research base tied to Ohio State. Lately every one of those businesses has heard the same pitch from some consulting company: hire an AI consultant and watch everything get fixed. Most of that pitch is noise.
I'm Richie Kastl, a tech partner in Northeast Ohio, about two hours up the road from Columbus. I've built software for clients for 14 years: websites, automations, and AI tools. My job is to find the few AI uses that save your team real hours, then build them myself.
One person owns the plan and the build, from the first call to the tool running in your business.
Where AI helps Columbus businesses first
Logistics and distribution
Draft shipment updates, sort incoming email by urgency, and turn tracking data into reports your customers can actually read.
Insurance and finance offices
Pull facts out of forms and documents, then draft the first reply. A person still signs off on every final answer.
Fast-growing companies
Put AI on the busy work before scaling up your headcount, so output grows faster than payroll.
Local service businesses
Answer web leads in minutes, day or night, and keep following up until they book.
What AI consulting means for a Columbus business
Columbus has become one of the country's busier logistics hubs, with warehouses and trucking yards ringing the outerbelt. Insurance and finance firms near Nationwide's headquarters push a huge amount of paperwork every day, and Ohio State keeps turning out engineers and data scientists. Intel's chip plant out in New Albany is still under construction and delayed. You don't need it finished to get value from AI, though. The work already here is plenty: stacks of repeat paperwork and piles of data, which is right where artificial intelligence earns its keep.
Good AI consulting starts with one question: where does your team spend hours on work a computer could do? The answer is usually a few small automations, like a form that reads itself, a workflow that sends each new lead to the right salesperson, or a report that pulls from three spreadsheets and lands in your inbox every morning. Generative AI writes the words and plain automation moves the data. Both only help once they're wired into the software your team already opens.
Machine learning, agentic AI, and AI agents are the AI technologies everyone's pitching right now. They pay off only when an AI system is hooked into your real tools and a person keeps an eye on it. Most AI projects stall in the gap between business and technology, and that's the gap I help clients close. After 14 years of software engineering and application development, I'd rather build three AI tools your team uses every day than pitch ten AI solutions that only look good in a meeting.
The Tech Audit: where we start
Every project starts with the Tech Audit. It runs two weeks, for one flat price. I look at your sales process, your customer data, and the busywork that eats your team's day, then hand you a ranked list of AI wins, sized by the time and money each one saves, along with a one-year plan for building and deploying them.
If we keep working together after the audit, the audit price comes off your first month. You get the answer either way, and it costs you nothing extra to find out what's worth building.
The audit fits a ten-person trucking company in Grove City as well as a 200-person firm in Dublin, because every idea gets sized to the team you already have. You walk away with a roadmap and a simple framework for ranking what to build next. And since I do the software development too, the plan comes with someone ready to build it.
The plan might cover internal tools for your staff, a cleanup of the customer data any big data project will need, and your AI strategy for the year. Each item lists the business outcome it should hit in numbers you can check, like hours saved per week or leads answered within five minutes.
The kind of work AI should handle for you
For a logistics or distribution company near the outerbelt, the easiest win is usually the exception list: the shipments running late, the orders missing a field, the carrier email that needs a reply right now. AI can sort that list every morning and draft the first reply, so your team spends its time on the two issues that matter instead of reading fifty emails to find them.
For an insurance or finance office, the target is the paperwork. AI tools can pull facts out of a claim form or an application, check them against your rules, and hand a person a clean one-page summary. Retail and distribution headquarters around Columbus can use the same trick on vendor invoices, purchase orders, or customer intake forms, which clears the pile so your staff gets to the judgment calls faster.
Underneath all of it sits data work: cleaning a customer list, connecting a point-of-sale system to a reporting tool, and the rest of the data engineering everything else depends on. Skip it and every AI tool you add later runs on messy numbers.
Keeping AI tools safe and on brand
Every automation starts as a small prototype you can watch working before it touches a real customer. Once it proves out, I add the safeguards: a person checks the output before it reaches a customer, and we set rules for which data can go to which AI tool. That keeps your customer list and financial data where they belong.
When volume grows, the setup should be scalable enough to handle more orders without hiring someone just to babysit it. Each month I report what ran, what it saved, and what needs a second look, with the data and analytics to back up every number.
The same data can feed business intelligence, too. Think of a weekly dashboard that shows your managers which customers are slipping and which routes cost the most. Each new deployment gets easier after the first, because the organizational questions are already settled: who checks the output, who owns the data, and who gets the alert when something breaks.
What an AI consultant does for you
Find what's worth fixing
We look at where your team's hours go, then rank the AI ideas by how fast each one pays you back.
Build it into your tools
I build the AI into what you already use: email, your customer list, spreadsheets, phone, and website.
Keep a human in charge
A person checks the work before it goes out, so AI only talks to a customer in a way you approved first.
Train your people
Your team learns the new setup through simple guides, which keeps it running after I step back.
Most of the work happens over video, so the two-hour drive never slows a project down. When a visit to your office would help, we can plan one.
Proof, not promises
My client sites have brought one American manufacturer $23 million in sales leads. For another, my site helped close a $10 million deal with a Fortune 100 company. I've built a platform that serves 398,000 users, and one project I worked on hit 4 million appearances on Google in a single month. In my own business, I use AI every day to write reports and draft outreach.
Frequently asked questions
What does it cost? +
We start with the Tech Audit. It's two weeks and one flat price. You get a ranked list of AI wins and a one-year plan. If we keep working together, the full audit price comes off your first month.
We already pay for AI tools. Why would we need a consultant? +
Most teams use AI like a search box. The bigger savings come from hooking it into your real work, so it runs on its own. That's the part I build.
Is Columbus a strong market for AI help? +
Yes. Big companies in Columbus bring in talent and money, and jobs in Columbus keep growing across logistics, insurance, and health care. Even so, plenty of smaller companies based in Columbus, Dublin, Westerville, and Hilliard still run on spreadsheets and manual follow-up. That gap is what the Tech Audit targets.
Which AI tasks pay off first for a Columbus business? +
Usually the repeatable stuff: sorting leads, drafting replies to web and email inquiries, pulling data out of forms, and writing reports that used to take an afternoon. The Tech Audit ranks these for your business, so you start with the one that pays back fastest.
How is this different from a typical AI consulting company? +
Most consulting firms stop at a report: a framework, a roadmap, and a bill for strategic planning. I do the AI development and the AI engineering myself, so the plan turns into a working tool your team uses instead of a document that sits in a shared drive.
Other areas I serve
Related services
One person for the plan and the work.
One spot is open. Apply, and if it's a good fit, we start with a Tech Audit. Two weeks, one flat price. It comes off your first month if we work together. Either way, you keep a one-year plan.